D.C. Abortionist Admits He Wouldn’t Help Save Aborted Baby Born Alive

The latest undercover video from Live Action has pro-life Americans concerned that the “post abortion” killings of newborn babies that were apparently standard operating procedure at abortionist Kermit Gosnell's Philadelphia “House of Horrors” may be more common at abortion clinics than previously thought. The video (seen at end of article) from the pro-life group, which goes undercover into Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinics to film illegal and horrific activities, shows Washington, D.C., abortionist Cesare Santengelo admitting that if a baby were born alive in his facility during an abortion procedure, he would not use his medical skill to help the baby survive.

In the troubling video clip posted to YouTube April 29, a Live Action undercover actress, posing as a woman who is 24 weeks pregnant, queries Santengelo about the abortion process and what would happen if her baby were somehow born alive. “Hopefully we’ll get this pregnancy out intact, but it doesn’t always happen that way,” Santengelo is seen telling the woman at the clinic. “I try and sever the umbilical cord first, and we wait for that to stop pulsing, and this way the fetus is expired first.”

Asked by the investigator what would he would do if the baby somehow survived the procedure, Santengelo is heard to explain that “legally we would be obligated to help it, you know, to survive.” However, he assures the expectant mom, the baby “probably wouldn’t” survive the violent procedure. “It’s all in how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive at this point,” he continues. “Let’s say you went into labor, the membranes ruptured, and you delivered before we got to the termination part of the procedure here.... Then we would do things — we would — we would not help it. We wouldn’t intubate.”

Santengelo goes on to liken the struggling newborn to a dying cancer patient — “a terminal person in the hospital.... You wouldn’t do any extra procedures to help that person survive. Like ‘do not resuscitate’ orders. We would do the same things here.”

The disturbing view is the second released by Live Action in as many days, showing an abortion clinic employee admitting to procedures in place that would kill a baby born alive during an abortion procedure. On April 28 the pro-life group posted a video showing an abortion counselor at a Bronx, New York, clinic describing how, if a baby survives the horrific procedure to kill him before delivery, he would be placed in a solution that would ensure his death.

Asked by the Live Action investigator, posing as a pregnant woman seeking an abortion, what would happen if her baby were to come out and still be breathing. The counselor assures her that a laboratory solution into which the “fetus” is placed would end his life. “The solution will make it stop,” she is heard to say. “It’s not going to be moving around in the jar.… That’s the whole purpose of the solution.” She adds that “it'll automatically stop. It won’t be able to … not with the solution.”

Live Action founder and president Lila Rose said that the two videos are part of a series of undercover investigations designed to expose late-term abortion clinics engaging in what she said are illegal and inhuman practices. “It is clear from our investigation that the horrors revealed during the Kermit Gosnell trial are not exclusive to that clinic,” said Rose as her group released the Santengelo video. “Our videos expose the truly gruesome, illegal, and inhuman practices going on inside many of America’s abortion clinics.”

Rose charged that the practices described on the two videos “are just another day at the office for abortionists and their staff.” She labeled the activities in the clinics “infanticide” and said the facilities “should be shut down and the doctors and clinic staff engaging in these inhuman and illegal practices should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

Following the posting of the video on which he unwittingly appears, Santengelo went on the offensive, describing the Live Action undercover investigators as “terrorists.” In an interview with the Washington Post, Santengelo insisted that he had been “tripped up” by the investigator proposing a hypothetical situation. In his later comments to the Post, the abortionist appeared to change his opinion of the “hypothetical” baby he had told the expectant mom he wouldn't help, insisting afterwards that “once the baby is born, it’s out of everybody’s hands, and the baby has rights, too. I understand that and I support that.” The federal Born Alive Infants Protection Act, passed in 2002, requires that medical care be extended to a baby who survives an abortion.

As for the undercover video in which he stars, Santengelo said that he had not watched it because “I don’t like to feed into these people. I really consider them terrorists.”

Responding to that accusation, Lila Rose said that “for Dr. Santangelo to call a 24-week pregnant woman a terrorist, after having just admitted he would leave struggling babies to die after surviving abortion, is a desperate attempt to distract from his own horrific actions. The numbness Dr. Santengelo displays to his victims is both heart-breaking and shocking.”

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